…yet there is madness in it.

Re: Once Upon a Time in the West

I love Westerns and I’m always interested in seeing how modern filmmakers interpret the genre. First up is Slow West starring Michael Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Kodi plays Jay Cavendish, a naive young Scottish aristocrat who travels to the American West in search of his true love, Rose (Caren Pistorius). Michael plays Silas, the outlaw drifter who is persuaded to act as Jay’s bodyguard. As they travel together, the two begin to bond–Jay starts to lose some of his cluelessness and Silas begins to question some of the decisions he’s made in his life. Unbeknownst to Jay, however, there are a gang of bounty hunters (led by Ben Mendelsohn) looking for Rose and her father. Can Michael and Jay find them before it’s too late?

This movie reminds me a great deal of Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch’s surreal Western allegory starring Johnny Depp. Like Dead Man, Slow West isn’t as interested in being a realistic depiction of the Old West as it is using the Western backdrop and characters to tell a modern fairy tale. While I don’t want to give away the ending, I can say that Slow West is much less of a downer than Dead Man is.

There are no happy endings in The Homesman, based on the book by Glendon Swarthout (The Shootist), and starring Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones.

In mid-19th century Nebraska Territory, three women have been driven mad by the hardships of Plains farming and need to be transported back to Iowa, a month’s long journey. The feckless men of the community won’t do it so it’s up to Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank), a gutsy spinster farmer, and a no-account claim jumper, George Briggs, that she rescued from hanging, to brave bad weather, brigands, and hostile Indians to do the job.

Although the movie never explicitly says so, the implication of the film is that the underlying cause of the womens’ madness is the cruelty, indifference, and incompetence of the men in their lives and the societal expectation that a woman isn’t really a woman unless she’s encumbered with one of these sorry bastards. Mrs. Svendsen’s husband is abusive, Mrs. Sours’ young husband seems incapable of helping his desperate wife, and Mrs. Belknap’s husband cares so little about his wife’s plight that he won’t be bothered to leave his farm.

Even the resolute and competent Mary Bee is not immune to the social isolation of the Plains. Although men outnumber women in the Nebraska Territory and Mary Bee has an excellent and prosperous farm, she can’t find a husband among the social rejects available to her. The bachelors she attempts to court find her too plain and too bossy. It says something about the quality of her suitors that the most eligible men in this film are the Pawnee war party–and they’re more interested in her horse.

As I said, the film doesn’t have a happy ending yet it’s the film which has stuck with me the most over the past few days.